Trimira Garach, Waterloo’s 2018 OAA Guild Medal winner, shares an anecdote and exercise on developing a cohesive thesis argument.
We’ve all heard stories about students beginning their thesis with one idea in mind, but then rapidly developing their work in a tangential direction. The open nature of the master’s program at our school can be both a blessing and a curse; while the ability to pursue a diverse set of topics that both intersect with and occupy the field of architecture affords us a great deal of freedom, it is very easy to get pulled in many different directions. I found myself in a similar situation as I was completing my own thesis, and hope that the personal anecdote below and the exercise that follows will allow you to consolidate your work and thoughts and move forward with your thesis with confidence, as it helped me.
It was my fourth term in the master’s program, and I was panicking. I had done a lot of work ranging from intensive diagrammatic case studies, to relevant reading about light, architecture, architectural lighting design, and optics, to a fairly developed but unsatisfactory parametrically-designed project, and to fully fleshed out essays that addressed and reflected on these pursuits. I had about ninety complete book pages set up, but was at something of an impasse and found myself needing to find another committee member due to unforeseen circumstances. I spoke with one my favourite professors whom I respect a great deal about a recent line of inquiry that I had started to follow. I was trying to find a way to connect architects to basic principles of optics that play a substantial role in the variations of natural light that reach architecture in the hopes that they would be able to access and understand this knowledge in a useful way. I was proposing developing a language around atmospheres and moments of light.
The ideas that I was proposing were messy, and the professor was a bit confused and didn’t seem to find them convincing. To be honest, I didn’t either. Discussions with my supervisor were quite free-flowing and always interesting, but often digressed. He communicated to me that simply foisting knowledge of optics on architects wasn’t going to achieve the desired effect (i.e. inspired investigations into the multitude of interactions between light and architecture) because its relevance wasn’t immediately obvious, and the principles hazily applicable. He and I both couldn’t quite think of a way to surpass this obstacle. When speaking with my prospective committee member, the sentiment of “So does this mean that you’re keeping all the work that you’ve already done? Are you going to… start over?” hung in the air.
[…] I was worried I didn’t have much of a thesis statement or argument at all […]. [My brother] gave me some much-needed practical advice […]
Feeling exhausted, and as though I was juggling several different lines of inquiry and argument in the work that I had already poured so much of myself and my time into, I went to my family home in Sarnia, Ontario, and without planning to, talked the whole work over with my brother, an actuary. I confessed that I was worried I didn’t have much of a thesis statement or argument at all, despite all of my efforts and insight into the quagmire of pedagogical material pertaining to light and architecture. He gave me some much-needed practical advice, and I’d like to share it in the hopes that it will help some of you that are in the same situation I was in. The instructions and intentions of the exercise are as follows:
- Open up a blank page in a word processor of your choosing and make the margins as small as possible.
- Keep the font size and line spacing reasonable and take two weeks to carefully think through and write out a summary of your thesis investigation, including its (hypothetical or otherwise) conclusions and projected deliverables.
- Don’t work on anything else while you do this.
- This single page of text should convey every major idea of your thesis and show how the ideas and studies/drawings/design work relate to one another to form an argument. The usefulness of the exercise lies in limiting your summary to a single page; if you exceed the limit, you must identify the most important ideas and edit out others. Even a very complex, nuanced argument summary should not exceed one page.
- Feel free to keep this one-pager to your most no-nonsense, critically-thinking self or to share it with a friend/peer and get some critical feedback so that you can identify areas where the ideas aren’t quite as clear as they need to be or don’t flow or follow.
- When you’ve got something that you feel is solid, send it to your supervisor and set up a meeting to discuss it. When your supervisor has approved the document, use it as a guide for both of you.
- This is a document that outlines how you’re framing the work that you’ve already done, and exactly what you plan to produce toward the completion of your thesis. Refer back to it as often as you need to, and always have a copy with you during your meetings so that you have a big picture roadmap on hand.
Though I never intended to publicly share my own one-pager, I’ve included it here so that you have a clear idea of what the one-page exercise looks like and so that you have an example on hand that is relevant to our program and field of study.
If you’d like the see my final thesis document, it can be read on UWSpace.
If you have any questions about the master’s thesis process, the one page exercise, or my work on developing pedagogical material to help students work with light more effectively, please feel free to reach out to me on social media or to send me an e-mail at tgarach@gmail.com.
Leave a Reply